Was I too harsh on my fellow Americans on Monday? Well, I did qualify my judgment that this is not a serious country when it comes to questions of national security, speculating that the protesters might be more vocal than numerous. And I changed my mind about writing a followup piece titled "Nation of babies demands protection from evil without anyone getting inconvenience or upset." I thought that was awfully magnanimous of me.
If the new Reuters/IPSOS poll is any indication, the media's histrionics are influencing the nation on this issue about as much as they did on the election itself, which is to say, not at all:
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 49 percent of Americans agreed with the order and 41 percent disagreed. Some 53 percent of Democrats said they "strongly disagree" with Trump's action while 51 percent of Republicans said they "strongly agree."
Democrats were more than three times as likely as Republicans to say that the "U.S. should continue to take in immigrants and refugees," and Republicans
were more than three times as likely as Democrats to agree that "banning people from Muslim countries is necessary to prevent terrorism."
Reuters characteristically buries the lead. You have to read down to the ninth paragraph before you find out that more Americans agree with the order than disagree. The lead tries to sell you on the idea that only 31 percent "feel more safe" as a result of the order, which is kind of a dopey way of asking the question. Agreeing or disagreeing with a government policy decision doesn't necessarily require you to think it will directly affect your own life.
By all the shrieking over the weekend, as well as all the media coverage of same, was clearly designed to make you think the entire nation was up in arms and opposed to Trump.
Nope.
The survey pretty well breaks down along expected partisan and demographic lines. There's a segment of the population that wants to be more aggressive in the fight against terrorism, and that segment pretty well supports Trump's action 100 percent. The effort to persuade people that this amounts to "turning our backs on those in need" didn't fool anyone. Anyone who sees it that way was already predisposed to oppose anything Trump did.
This, I think, is a mistake the left makes consistently without any understanding of how it's hurting itself. The left thinks that if it acts insane enough, and frames the actions of its opponents in incendiary enough language (racist. Muslim ban, etc.), it will wear people down and persuade them to agree - or at the very least, intimidate them into silence if they're not persuaded.
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They do have some success with the latter portion, especially when we're talking about corporations and public figures who are afraid of negative publicity. But persuading people? They have basically no success at all there. Combine the two elements, and what you'll often find is that the left thinks the public is much more on its side than it really is. People don't agree with them, and privately they resent being bullied into silence, but that silence does create the temporary illusion of winning.
That's why catastrophic defeats at the ballot box are often so shocking. They really thought everyone agreed with them, when in fact they were just waiting for a chance to act, rather than speak, to take away the left's power.
